Yesterday, a friend showed me a CJ the X video about Brony Music. I've watched a few CJ the X videos, but I hadn't watched this one because I haven't been watching much media analysis YouTube lately. I was kind of tuned out, but I started paying attention when I heard, "Everyone born in the 90, just huddle up for a sec. Does anypony else feel like the world our parents prepared for us died in front of our eyes?" and I realized why I have felt so angry since Trump took office for the second time. Since I asked my parents, "Aren't you worried that reality doesn't matter? That the people in power can accuse you of anything, and that becomes reality for so many people?" and they went, "What are you talking about? That is reality!"

The full quote

Everyone born in the 90, just huddle up for a sec. Does anypony else feel like the world our parents prepared for us died in front of our eyes? I don't know that much about the economy, but I know that you used to be able to buy a house. I know that people used to have careers instead of 32 apps that each pay you $1. What I watched occur as I got older was, this real life responsibility society world that my parent was trying to convince me to care about instead of the internet? It ceased to exist. The common sense wisdom of my elders ceased to be relevant. And the financial goalpost that they measured themselves by became unattainable unrealistic or just so distorted that I I couldn't there was nothing to grow up into. Being a teenager in the 2010s was about early internet meme culture, but it was also about realizing that we were not going to receive the things that were promised to previous generations. It was about being assured that if I go to university I will get a good respectable job, while watching college dropouts become the billionaire oligarchs that control my society and watching kids my age become millionaires on YouTube. It was about being called out of class into the school gymnasium to receive a lecture on not trusting strangers on the internet and then watching the adults who gave me that lecture become brainwashed into conspiratorial far-right conspiracy cults because of anonymously moderated Facebook groups. When real life fails to provide community and culture and meaning, they will turn to the internet. Everything's been changing since last generation was born.

-- "Part Six: why am I scared?" from CJ the X's video The Brony Song That Makes Me Cry

Adults are missing from this society. The people who taught my generation how to cooperate and tolerate and act with integrity have regressed mentally. Many people have entered into their first ever phase of internet brainrot and then never emerged. What was, for some of my generation, an adolescent phase of allowing the feed and the groupchat and the mob to control our emotions has become the default way of being. As I became more capable of handling it, of attenuating my access to it, it became the whole world.

I truly believe I am a completely different person than I was before the internet absorbed me, changed me, and spat me back out. I remember the year after I got my first smartphone, the year the internet became the dominant force in my life, and I look at that year as the time when I became myself. I realized, suddenly, that I had been hiding myself underneath who the people around me expected me to be, but also I saw that self in the distorted mirror provided by my feed. I have grown since then, I have healed from that frantic obsessive all-the-time scrolling and chatting that the first Brainrot Phase entailed, but I am not able to return to being the person I was before.

I think that the initial effect that the internet had on me was mixed good and bad. At that time, my parents saw the change in me, and they struggled to keep up. I felt betrayed that my parents couldn't tolerate the change in my personality as I became my own person, but I do understand now that it did take their child away in some way. Not in the "fear the trans cult!" way that they think, of course. It was partially in the way that I learned to harrass and shun, to find anything acceptable in the interest of fighting injustice. It was the ways in which I learned to think independently, and the other ways in which my mental independence shrank away from me, as the FEELING of the internet became a permanent fixture in my mind.

However, it was also partially in a way that television and their first drivers licenses and teenage nights on the town must have taken them away from their own parents. I gradually became an independent agent in my society, getting online in kindergarten and getting a cellphone in 3rd grade and a DS in fifth grade and a laptop in 6th, and then a smartphone, irrevocably changing me, in high school. At every step along the way, I was exposed to things I would shudder to look at now, and I became somebody new under my parents' nose. I hid it well at first-- I worried they would not love me. I don't think I was wrong to worry. I had learned that one parent never loved me the way a parent ought to-- the internet taught me what abuse, gaslighting, and manipulation was. But my parents had loved who I was to some extent before, and they showed no signs of pleasure at who I was becoming. I thought, isn't identity change a normal thing for teenagers? Shouldn't they have anticipated adjusting to me as I grow? Perhaps to some extent, but now I recognize they were not and still are not equipped for what the internet does to people.

The internet took my parents away from me, over the course of the past decade. I think that religion took them away from me in some respects, months before I was born, but the "themselves" they were as Evangelical Christians in those early years were still the ones who taught me to value free thought, to not be a bully, and to be wary of strangers on the internet.

I had resolved to move out as soon as possible when I was a young child, not enjoying the experience of being tugged around by my hair, but the acuteness of the pain dulled as I approached adulthood. My parents had always, to some extent, been basically reasonable, so I lingered. This lingering changed when sharp moments of disappointment punctuated my life with increasing frequency. My mom throwing up because a black man was president. Realizing she was a mere racist, with disgust. Years later, me explaining political movements as they emerged to my mom, hoping to inoculate her against Fox News, and feeling like I'd succeeded whenever she went, "Oh, okay, that makes sense. I can understand that," only for her to trust the news over me every single fucking time, with increasing frequency. In 2016, my mom mentioning offhand that she had been "friends" with a famous nazi on twitter before she "found out he was a socialist" (referring to "national socialism"). So she agreed with the Nazi until she realized he was too far left for her, I guess. I gave up on her, but my dad was still reasonable when I finally moved out.

He's not reasonable anymore, and I don't know when that happened. He used to be a libertarian-- not the best, from my perspective, but libertarians used to at least give a shit about freedom, individuality, rights, privacy, and dignity. He also used to be really good at respecting leftwards opinions. Now he's an authoritarian, loves Trump, loves Worms-for-Brains RFK Jr. I feel like I don't know him anymore.

Before Covid, I at least got the privilege of being torn apart from my mother by the internet, as we drifted in opposite directions, over the course of years. We discussed what we learned online with each other and learned to get along well enough to go grocery shopping together. Enough to share lunch and make each other laugh. In the 5 years since I last lived with any member of my family, the father I respected, the stable and tolerant man who I wanted to BE, seemingly has just, poof! Disappeared. Gone.

Finding my Grandmother in Douglas Pagels, Someone's Mom, and Somebody Named Hi

I never liked it when older millennials would remark about the 80s, 90s, even the early 2000s being a simpler and better time, much like nostalgia for the midcentury fails to land. I find it difficult to be nostalgic about times when I know terrible things were happening to people who were pushed aside by society. However, when I look back at videos of those years, I am starting to see what they mean. These were the years when the uninoculated public optimistically trusted their own society, even as history and the virtuous parts of the American way of life began to be attacked in the early years of the Evangelical Holy War on American freedom. People, at least the sort of people who ended up in recordings that are preserved today, really were... apparently blessedly clueless. Or the normies of the time just didn't feel a need to poison themselves with irony.

The times were not simpler and better. Life has never been simple. But the times were more optimistic, and society felt real.

Democrats who apparently don't know what happened between then and now keep asking for "the adults in the room" to take back control, but I don't think there are any anymore. Democrat leaders are not doing what they need to do, somehow taking this even less seriously than the cruel, evil freaks ruining our society. That CJ the X quote... "Watching the adults who gave me that lecture become brainwashed into conspiratorial far-right conspiracy cults because of anonymously moderated Facebook group." Today's adults are not just becoming brainwashed or brainrotted, not just struggling with digital addiction, but failing the next generations of children. There is nobody to lecture the kids anymore, seemingly. The very few teachers who have the resources to care, to try to do SOMETHING for the kids, are hated by the parents and are threatened by school shooters and are surveiled by their bosses and are always having more and more and more taken away from them. Even if we just said, "fuck it" and considered the older folks a loss because they were not able to recover from their first run-in with internet brainrot, we can't trust that things will simply get better, because our society does not value children. And so children are being abandoned to grapple with addiction alone, monitored by scant few sane adults who are not given the resources to truly give those children the care they need. There is almost no one left to save this world, it seems, and the powers that be are doing their best to ensure that future generations will be incapable of doing anything about it.

I have made the mistake of calling my parents for comfort a few times this year. I am a young adult, and I am terrified, and I just needed my parents to be my parents, for at least ten minutes. These moments left me angry. The people who raised me were not perfect, but I did expect I could call them and have a conversation that would make me feel better in some way. They are not lost, utterly, but they will not listen to me. My viewpoint, that of their family member who they once shared dinnertable discussions with, is less important to them than the words of a decrepit worm-brained ghoul who wants to put autistic people (including my parents' own grandchildren) on a registry, less important than the words of a dictator who hates the race of one of my parents and all of their children and thinks we ought to be killed or exiled.

I went to a community center recently, and they had a pile of free books. I read the first few pages of several, but I ended up taking home one that I found quaint and charming. A Keepsake for MY CHILDREN by Douglas Pagels is a very short and colorful 2000s text, printed entirely in multicolored Papyrus font, every page illustrated with quaint watercolor decorative art. It's the kind of thing that would have disgusted me prior to the moment I picked it up. As a child, I resented this kind of sentimental nonsense. During a time when I was expected to be enchanted by nicktoons, quirky garden fairy statues, cheap glitter lipgloss, and girl power narratives, I found myself haunted by Revelations, The Left Behind Series, spiritual warfare, tales of demonic forces controlling my schoolteachers, and the ever-present dark cloud of emotional smoke hovering over a childhood where a fire always roared in the next room, threatening to blaze through my bedroom door if I cried too loudly. I did not believe that anybody loved anybody. I did not believe adults wanted me to follow my dreams. I did not believe society rewarded the unique. I was a child lucky enough to watch anime and play animal crossing and go to public school, but I believe my adulthood would be militant, dark, and brief. I resented promises of a bright future from responsible adults, because I was being prepared by my church and by my mother for the dark world we are in today. Lucky me.

I picked up the book expecting to feel the usual resentment I feel towards people nostalgic for the period that was the most unpleasant period of my life-- my childhood before I had social media to validate my feelings of injustice about how children like me were being treated. Inside the book, I found a dedication by somebody's mom. Thanks for the book, (somebody else's) Mom. I found a note on the office stationery of a man who had the same profession as my father in the same region my parents hail from, but the note was seemingly signed with the word "Hi", rather than any usual name or parental title. It was signed in cursive, and I guess the signature must have reduced down to almost nothing from whatever actual starting point their name was. The handwriting of both notes was handsome, and Hi's note was dated 2005. I got the impression this was a Christmas gift. I wonder how it ended up at the community center.

The author's dedication starts with, "I hope you'll keep this forever," and I wonder who received this and if they kept it forever enough. If this meant anything to them. If they're alive or dead. If their relationship to this book meant anything to them. If their relationship to Mom and/or Hi meant enough to them to keep this book for 20 years, or if the notes have traveled with the book from proprietor to proprietor.

The author himself lived at that time in the same state as my Grandmother, who I would visit as a child. Those visits to my grandmother, an old hippie in Colorado who never told me terrifying things about spiritual war, who never pulled me by my hair or screamed at me, who only expected me to play outside and draw inside and study my passion and help with chores and meals, they still feel in my memory like what a childhood should be. She did lecture me, of course. I was not the perfect child. She was not always nice. But I was never terrified of her. I see the person who raised my father to be the man I admired, even if their own relationship wasn't perfect. I understand she was not a perfect mother, but I think she is an optimist, and I think she has a deeply admirable capacity for loving other humans. She is the one person in my life who I could ever imagine giving me this book.

She is now in a memory care center. It is not easy, for her or for anyone else. It is hard knowing this was one of her deepest fears, too. However, she is also handling it better than I believe she thought she would have. She still displays that sort of inherent self in many ways-- musical and trusting and hopeful. My parents have always talked to me about her like her perspective was childish, and in circumstances like these I somewhat understand that tone. But I still remember the capable adult who helped me pursue my interests, who taught me how to explore cities and nature on my own, and who taught me how to be empathetic towards people who are unfamiliar to me in some way. I don't regret being prepared for the dark present by parents who believe the world is cruel and life is a battle. But I believe children should have the opportunity to have even those scarce weekends with some adult who is empathetic, creative, caring, and who stubbornly chooses to remain naive about humanity across decades of life, despite all the evidence that humanity might not be very good at all.

My grandfather who divorced my grandmother also helped me in much the same way my grandmother did. I am glossing over him right now, because he died awhile back and I feel more resolved about that relationship right now, but he also gave me a chance to feel like life could be worth living past the age of 19, to feel like somebody really loved me and was rooting for me. I called him on the phone a lot in college. I think I would call him today, if he were still alive, and I think he would make me feel better in a way my parents will never do for me.

My parents isolated me from my extended family somewhat. I never saw my aunts and uncles. I rarely saw my grandparents. My parents often were quite derisive about the fact that our relatives were not born-again evangelical protestants, that many of our relatives were Democrats, or worse, Catholics, Unitarian Universalists, and Agnostics. One can't have that kind of terrible influence on their kids! My mother told my sister and I that she was protecting us from them, that they would blame us (at that time elementary school children) for terrible things that happened to our family. In retrospect, I don't know my relatives well enough to say whether or not she was completely lying, but I know her well enough to think she would lie to keep us from asking to see those relatives who she didn't want influencing us.

My parents did not give me this book. My grandmother did not give me this book. Whoever bought this book and gave it to their child, they did not give me this book. Douglas Pagels did not give me this book. I don't know that any of these people would give anybody this book anymore. But this book retains the notion that there have been parents who want their children to have a happy life, a bright future, and a dream come true. It's utterly saccharine. It's sweet. I laugh when I see it, the papyrus font and twee illustrations. Every word inside, though, seems like what a parent ought to say to their child.

None of it is advice that is specific enough to be helpful. It's... kind of insipid. But it makes me wish I lived in a world full of shallowly positive wishes for the children of the future. I wish I lived in a world of foolish optimists who could still afford to be unaware of a one-sided Holy War attacking their way of life. I wish I was ever a person who could look at this object, this bright colorful large-fonted book of platitudes and nice little wishes apparently written for young adults, and think, yeah, this is gonna help.

I look through the pages and I feel the mixed pain-happiness of knowing adults have ever wanted their children to be happy in this way, in the "follow your dreams" "stick to your guns" "be yourself" way, and really seemed to think it was possible.